With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous...

Chosen an "Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights in the United States" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. In this volume of incisive essays, Ward Churchill looks at representations of American Indians in literature...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then a book about performance art is surely like a sonata about sculpture. In the case of The New World Border, however, there is little lost in translation; the force and originality of...

Paul Garon knows the blues, from the music itself to the poetry and psychology that are the impetus of its creation. The author of biographies of such blues icons as Peetie Wheatstraw and Memphis Minnie, Garon focuses on the social and political...

While Aileen Wournos, the alleged “female serial killer” who insists she killed in self-defense, sits on death row, Hollywood filmmakers appropriate her story. Meanwhile, in our perverse justice system the sexual assaults and murders of forty-five...

The Tears of Eros is the culmination of Georges Bataille's inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton...

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality-Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily...

In a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, transient lovers May and Eddie spin around in a room in a relentless struggle for power and truth. Through recollections and dreams, multiple versions of a fierce and fatal love story are told.

Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a live legend in the theater. Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and...

"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a...